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Thursday, June 6, 2013

Thanks for your support! As many of you may know Google Reader will be gone on July 1st.

For those of you who have no idea what Google Reader is - relax! In previous versions of NewsSquares, we have depended on Google Reader, a news service from Google, to store your preferences and readings. Google will now retire the service, so we will have to migrate your data from their servers.

In the past few months, we have made a lot of effort in making sure that NewsSquares will continue to be the news reading app we love. We have come up with this new version that retains the overall NewsSquares experience and letting go the "Reader" features.

Once you have upgraded to this version (1.5), you will be asked to migrate your subscriptions. If you have less than 60 feeds, your subscriptions will be migrated automatically (before July 1st). Otherwise, you will be asked to either import feeds from your existing account (before July 1st) or from an OPML file. Once the import is completed, your subscriptions will no longer be linked to Google Reader. It will be a good time to have a clean up of your feeds!

The overall NewsSquares experience is retained with some of the following major changes:

Subscriptions are stored locally at this moment. In the next version, we will enable Chrome native cloud storage.

A maximum of 50 items will be fetched for each feed, historical items might not be available

For users with multiple Reader account, please use separate Chrome profile to use NewsSquares as only one profile is supported now

Share/like/tag/comment actions on an item will be replaced by sharing to Google+, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Most keyboard shortcuts will work as before, while some Google Reader specific shortcut will be gone

Unread counts are loaded when NewsSquares is launched, the counts will be default to OFF for users with lots of feeds

Suggestions on migration:

For users with substantial number of feeds (100+), we suggest you to import feeds that are most frequently visited. Use other full-feature reader replacements to handle your complete subscription list;

Please remember to export your Google Reader data via Google takeout at this page. The downloads contain your subscriptions in a OPML file (subscriptions.xml), which can be imported into many popular feed readers;

If you had multiple Reader accounts, you might need to adjust your NewsSquares settings if they are not migrated properly.

Please feel free to send us your suggestions and hope you enjoy using NewsSquares!

22 comments:

Sorry for posting here. I wasn't sure where the support pages are. Thanks for keeping NewsSquares up to date. I use it everyday and appreciate all the work you do. I just updated to 1.5.0 and now it's not working. I'm on Windows 7 with Chrome Version 27.0.1453.110 m and all I get when opening NewsSquares is NewsSquares is Loading...

Thanks for the reply. It's all imported and good now. I do have to agree with the others. It's amazing how much I relied on the "show only feeds with unread items" and the counts in small squares. Right now I can't tell if there is new or unread posts without clicking on each square. Is this a restriction of the new way you store the feeds or was it a design decision ?

Agree entirely. What was an economical way to review a large number of items from a large number of feeds is now a hunt for the needle in the haystack. The newer version is at once cruder and more cumbersome, an un-improvement.

Thanks for the ideas. The unread count is pre-calculated by Google Reader server, therefore we decide to keep the unread count only for feeds in big squares (because of performance issues, especially for users with lots of feeds). Yet we might improve the unread counts mechanism later if we have new ideas.

It's a situation where I never really appreciated something until it's gone. How much of a performance issue would it be to have an unread count? I'm even considering making all my feeds big, but I have less than 100. Is this the same reason there's no "mark all as read" option?

Also didn't it used to be that feeds with newer entries were towards the left and older ones to the right?

I know you guys can work out how to get the unread count in there. I have complete faith.

How about adding support for Feedly's (open?) clone of the Google Reader interface? Feedly is nice and all, but NewSquares' UI fits my use so much better. I wouldn't really mind migrating to NewsSquares entirely, except that I read my news on multiple devices and on some, I prefer a different app for reading.

Jeez, this whole thing has totally blown me away. Sorry, guys. Am kicking NewsSquares into touch as everything has now gone belly up. I'll have to look for some other news feed programme as this update/revamp is just one step too far......

I'm glad you're still functioning (with news squares rather than feed squares) now that google reader is defunct. But on my phone I use Newsify, and it (thankfully!) has tied itself into Feedly as its source as a replacement for Google Reader. Feedly is useful for organizing things in a similar interface to Google Reader on the laptop and seems to be "the big one" to fill the void they left, but I like News Squares format better for just browsing and reading the feeds. So right now I've got three different services I use for RSS feeds, and two of them are linked... Could News Squares be linked to Feedly as well? That way when things are marked as "read" or are starred/bookmarked/whatevered, they will be synchronized across all my platforms and readers.Thank!L.

I have the "show only feeds with unread items" option checked, but it does not work. Even after reloading the articles, closing the browser, restarting my computer... I still see the read items on my page.Please fix this? This was my favorite feature of NewsSquares.

Hi, this looks really great. I just have one question. I wish to import a private rss feed from reddit.com is there any way of doing that? I've tried adding it in the 'find favorites' with the box checked add as direct url and nothing happens I'm not sure if that's what that is actually for. Is there a way to add a url of an rss feed directly? If not any chance of adding that support? Thanks again.